Bowyer was fourth in the Chase going into the final race of the season and a second-place finish at Homestead-Miami Speedway, combined with Jimmie Johnson’s mechanical failure, resulted in Bowyer vaulting to second.

“I’m about positive stuff,” Bowyer said after his speech at the postseason awards banquet. “The good news is it paid a hell of a lot more (to finish second) than fourth, which is where I was at at the start of Homestead.

“I’m happy to be second. I hope it’s not a jinx. If it is, I guess I won’t have to answer this awkward question next year.”

How happy was Bowyer to finish second? After the banquet, he raised his second-place trophy over his head and turned toward five-time champion Jimmie Johnson, yelling, “I beat Jimmie Johnson!”

Finishing 39 points behind Keselowski (and one point ahead of Johnson), Bowyer looks back at the start of 2012 and can’t believe he finished second.

He had never driven for another Cup team other than Richard Childress Racing before the start of the season. And now he was at Michael Waltrip Racing, an organization that had won just two races and never had a driver make the Chase for the Sprint Cup.

“I knew from the very first test we had (it),” Bowyer said. “I was very, very nervous going into it. I didn’t know a face I was working with other than a casual conversation, I truly didn’t know anybody on my race team.”

It didn’t take him long to figure out that he and crew chief Brian Pattie fit well together. That’s why he isn’t worried about a second-place jinx in 2013.

Both Pattie and Bowyer have their roots in short-track racing and both don’t have many interests besides the outdoors and racing.

“The key was having a good leader and that guy was Brian Pattie,” Bowyer said. “I needed somebody to keep me calm, keep me focused in the game.

“It has been a great relationship. Our backgrounds are a lot the same, the way we go about things. We both enjoy what we do. We love racing and we have a blast doing it. When it’s time to get your hands dirty and get to work, we’re both plenty capable of doing that.”

So while the events of Phoenix, where Jeff Gordon’s retaliation knocked him out of championship contention and started a brawl between their teams, will remain in his mind, Bowyer has confidence that his team can still perform and build on 2012 rather than see a rapid decline.

If they performed well without knowing each other, they expect to do even better after having worked together for a season — even if the bodies of the cars are changing for 2013.

“Look at how we ran in the Chase,” Bowyer said. “A bad race was sixth. We were bummed out. When you’re running like that, it’s pretty rare. … We were building a notebook and learning form each other and learning from the mistakes we learned the first couple of times around those racetracks.

“That’s when you get a sense of what you’ve got for a race team and understand what you’re up against. It gives me a lot of confidence and a lot of pride knowing what is in store.”